2019 National Poetry Series Winners

Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.

Rosanna Warren is the author of Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, Departure, and Ghost in a Red Hat. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, Rosanna Warren blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems in So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company) surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural. Identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and traditions of the sacred. Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News, praised it as ” a book of love and war, rich with poems of desire and rage, situated in our nearly unbearable historical moment, alive to its challenges and pleasures. Rosanna Warren uses passion and calculation in equal measure to grapple with an uncertain future.”

Alexandria Hall is founder and editor-in-chief of Tele- Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications including The Yale Review, Narrative, BOAAT, The Bennington Review, Foundry, Prelude, and Hobart. She holds an MFA from New York University and is now a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her debut poetry collection, Field Music (Ecco, 2020), was selected by Rosanna Warren as the 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series.  In it, Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience. Field Music is a thoughtful and alert collection from a major emerging voice.